Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Best Friends Means I Pull the Trigger (Best Friends Means You Get What You Deserve)

Dear Boyfriends,

Yes, plural—I know, I’m discovering as if for the first time, too. (Rouge-ish, that ‘as if’. As if I knew and am now only owning up to it? As if! …Yes, exactly: as if what? As if wise enough? devious enough? capable enough? dispassionately passionate enough? Enough. Period. Yes, boys have periods too. Essentialize that.)

I find myself somewhat at a loss. I’m not used to addressing a plural intimate, no matter the fact some would contend that is disingenuous. After all, what is this talk about the plurality of the psyche, of the body itself even, if not a championing of the plurality of intimate relations? I tip my hand: I rarely feel intimate with myself in the plural—I often find myself uncomfortable among many competing demands, the demand to perform, to meet a standard, to stand at attention, to not let intimacy flag, erect quivering attentive.

There is, in any great concentration of desire, a deadening of the soul’s plurality, a great narrowing and channeling of attention. I regret nothing in the span of this great concentration, honed-in, penetrating deeply. There is only this. Now. Many suidices, athletes, war veterans, artists, and lovers have often spoken the same way. But then, I am all of these, expansive as I am. So romantic, so noble—possibly tortured. As if.

There is a sex toy ironically named for a phantasy I only now realize. “It’s so two bottoms can be boyfriends.” So blithely tossed out, as if knowingly. A fuck you to the domineering pre-tense of tops, who can’t imagine their cock supplanted by a dildo. My dick is my phallus! (As if...) For all of the boys I fucked, it’s the ones I never did that I love, and there seems something profoundly unfair about this. Forget communities of impersonal intimacy. I live in communities of unrequited love. Sublimated libido. Misshapen, gaps and ad hoc binding exposed, two different colors—this dildo has not sold, and now the sign that reads “New!…” reads like a bad joke, propped up on a pedestal, slightly out of reach, slightly out of sight—but a nice idea. As if… a queertopia!

The time of ‘as if’ is the future, and the space of the ‘as if’ is the imaginary domain?

As if it weren’t smoking or cat allergies or any number of differences too innumerable to enumerate… Let the dildo mean more than it does. It’s the silly sense of things: over-determine—perhaps even fetishize—the damn thing. And your boyfriend. The one you talk to. Whose dick is also sometimes phallic. Forget ‘as if’ is as superficial as it is/n’t: lie. My noble lie. So romantic, so noble—possible tortured. As if.

As if I weren’t happy to sleep with my phone by my pillow so his call will wake me? I’m quite pleased for the chance, thank you. This sort of impersonal intimacy. So I can have my refuge from the demands of requited love. (Who makes these demands? With what authority? As if I knew… As if.) The phantasmagoria of exclusive, reciprocal love--the caresses, the promises, the little gestures of on-goingness comprising the melange of meaning always already on the brink of being compromised--and uneasy alliance of disavowal and earnest vows.

The discomfort of a membrane stretched too thin, too easily ruptured, pierced--a hymen of sensibility. Or a condom. Filled with water. Dropped from the 22nd story window of the penthouse apartment you dream of one day sharing with your partner. (In crime, in law, in life?) So I stopped fucking with condoms, but that was itself a risk perhaps too risky to take, or rather, receive. And when I look at the folds of my anus I wonder if the swollen musculature looks more like a scar on the order of a pussy or if that is just the effects of age and regular use--having just been used. I wonder if my asshole is ugly, and I consider how this might be a trifling question compared to the more pertinent question, namely: am I ugly? The wrinkles around my eyes and mouth. Folds of flesh on the order of a scar, use and age? As if my face is an asshole. A funny persona to think about. As if I could stand to think about the degeneration of my body.

The terror of realizing that, when taken to its logical conclusion, positing plurality and flux leads to a dissolution of every solid banister or wall or ground. That, indeed, there was never anything solid there in the first place. We've always been in free-fall. And this is something like falling in love--the sense of falling at the same rate: as if if the laws of gravity, mass, density, ect. conspired together, like when windshield wipers flap back and forth in time with the left-turn indicator: tick-flap, flop-tock. I joke regularly about the phantom cosmic clock that times my life with J. And though I know it is a metaphor--do you know what I mean?--it still is one of those necessary fictions--one of those 'as ifs' that I don't question and can only embrace and cling to with the desperation of someone who knows that this clock is not Swiss made, that it will become syncopated. And then what? As if I knew. So romantic, so noble... As if tortured.

Of course, I write as if my boyfriend reads this. No, these are illicit attachments--a desire for what is by definition out of reach: and indeed, this is the way I like it. Though I get nervous about the extent to which I keep at bay what I otherwise would want to release myself to. And I wonder about how expansive and retractive my life becomes, the rhythms of receptivity accelerated by the necessity of keeping-time for/with/to the demands I desire obliging myself to. Because I spoke these words: I want... (Sappho) As if I knew what I wanted. Though, on the short list: the 'then' (Sunday) 'now' (today). I miss J.

The brutality of desire is its exhaustibility. There is no defense here: I am a selfish lover, and you, dear boyfriends, were brutalized by my exhaustion. So beautifully resplendent in its fatigue--flaccid desire is curdled milk. Thirsty? And yet, you are not alone in this measuring out, this parceling time, intimacy, desire, pleasure. Even J. suffers from the insistence of this instantiation of incrementalized instances of intimacy. Everything succumbs to the incessant need to quantify, divide, subtract, add--all this math--all of these numbers... Does this count as an apology? Does it add up to the needed guilt or innocence? Divide my attention by the answer; multiply this by 2/4/8/16/32. Keep the remainder. Hope the balance changes. Wonder what this amounts to. What does this amount to? As if I could calculate...

And the other night when I passed out in my bathroom, when my cellular phone dropped into the toilet half full of piss, when my head crashed against the unyielding metal of the radiator, when I woke and heard on the short-circuiting of the phone buzzing through the filth and porcelain, the flashes of pain, the vomit, the piss. What scared me was precisely the inability to speak. Or move. I cried. There was no one there. J. gone. My neighbors unknown. Phone broken. More vomit. Shoveling ice-cream down my throat to get sugar in my blood. Blood on my hands from my head. Scared and alone. As if in free fall.

I'm going to go home, smoke some pot, drink more coffee, smoke more cigarettes--does it make sense to brag about future plans to quit over the summer? in the name of youth and health and vanity and terror--and then ride my bicycle. It isn't very warm out--or at least, not as warm as I would like--who do I complain to about this--as if weather were a bureaucracy you could score cheap points off when you needed to boost your self-esteem. But no one does what I do better than me. And though I'm rarely sure what exactly it is that I do, what I am rather positive of--to the extent that one can in fact be _positive_--is that I act out these silly vignettes--... Or have you stopped reading? As if...